MSN buys into Net calling future | CNET News.com

MSN buys into Net calling future | CNET News.com: "Microsoft plans to announce Tuesday that it has purchased a small Internet calling start-up called Teleo, as part of a move to expand the capabilities of MSN Messenger.
The move comes as all the major portal and IM companies are moving more heavily into Internet calling. Last week, Google launched its own instant-messaging service, dubbed Google Talk, with a focus on voice chatting.
Microsoft has its eyes set on something more like Net phone company Skype's service, however. A key part of Teleo's technology is focused on making calls from a computer to an ordinary telephone, a feature that company executives said would start finding its way into MSN Messenger before the end of 2005.
'We've been making a lot of investments in voice, but as we looked at continuing...we had that build or buy discussion,' said Brooke Richardson, lead product manager for MSN's communication services division. 'We decided that if we wanted to do things rapidly, Teleo was a good fit.'
The acquisition underlines the growing importance of voice services, increasingly indistinguishable from an ordinary telephone, to the instant-message platforms that have been one of the Internet's most popular applications.
This has tracked the explosive growth of Net calling, or voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services over the past several years. Just as VoIP has been available for years to hobbyists and early technology adopters, voice chat has been an option inside most instant-messenger applications for some time. "